At Day's Close

by A. Roger Ekirch

  England’s comparative freedom from foreign invasion by the end of the Middle Ages largely explains its dwindling number of fortified communities, from just over one hundred earlier in the era. Several of the more enduring structures encircled the Great Towns of Norwich, Exeter, and York. Some English towns, in the absence of walls, enjoyed the protection of ditches and earthen banks. In London, despite the ancient city’s decaying bastions, numerous gates separated one neighborhood from another, even in the years following the Great Fire. Along with gates that survived the conflagration, others, such as Ludgate and Newgate, were rebuilt with “great solidity and magnificence.” All the city’s portals, testified William Chamberlayne in 1669, “are kept in good repair, and all are shut up every night with great diligence.”5

  For the sake of social order, communities barred gates in peace as well as war. Long after walls lost their military value, they guarded townspeople against rogues of all stripes, including vagrants and gypsies. Brigands whipped out of a town by day might return by night bent on vengeance, hoping to set homes ablaze. As early as the thirteenth century, Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote of the dangers posed by both “enemies” and “thieves.” Without walls, magistrates in one French city dreaded “entry by every sort of person.”6

  Often, benighted travelers, caught abroad once gates closed, were forced to lie outdoors if lodging could not be had in a faubourg. Three times, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to his great anxiety, found himself outside the barred gates of Geneva, a city without suburbs. Of one instance, he wrote, “About half a league from the city, I hear the retreat sounding; I hurry up; I hear the drum being beaten, so I run at full speed: I get there all out of breath, and perspiring; my heart is beating; from far away, I see the soldiers from their lookouts; I run, I scream with a choked voice. It was too late.” Elsewhere, entry occasionally followed the payment of a toll, known in Germany as Sperrgeld, or entrance-money. The city of Augsburg featured a special night-gate, Der Einlasse (the wicket-gate), which required passage through a series of locked chambers and across a drawbridge. In a French community, the sergeant of the guard, hoping to reap a small fortune from the throngs of citizens attending a distant fair, ordered the town’s bell rung a half-hour early, with tardy souls forced either to pay a penny or remain abroad all evening. Such was the mad crush of panicked crowds as they neared the gate that more than one hundred persons perished, most trampled in the stampede, others pushed from the drawbridge, including a coach and six horses. For his rapacity, the guardsman was broken upon the wheel.7

  To curb nocturnal traffic within town walls, municipal authorities imposed curfews. Only hours after gates closed (or sooner, in the summer), bells warned families to repair to bed once fires were covered. The term “curfew” reportedly originated from the French word couvre-feu, meaning “cover-fire.” In 1068, William the Conqueror (ca. 1028–1087) allegedly set a national curfew in England of eight o’clock. Whether his intention was to prevent fires or, as critics later alleged, to avert midnight conspiracies against his reign, similar restrictions found favor throughout medieval Europe. Not only were streets swept of pedestrians, but homes still aglow after the curfew bell ran afoul of authorities. Besides incurring fines, offenders faced the risk of incarceration, especially if caught outdoors.8 Few exemptions were allowed, mostly for persons on missions of life or death—priests, doctors, and midwives—also scavengers (garbage collectors) and veterinarians, for the loss of domestic stock could be devastating to a struggling family. Night laid bare society’s most pressing priorities. In England at least, mourners were permitted to keep watch all night over bodies of the dead (fearing the Church’s retribution for invoking magic, one guild mandated that none of its members at such vigils “calls up ghosts” or “makes any mockeries of the body or its good name”).9

  Lending weight to curfews, massive iron chains, fastened by heavy padlocks, blocked thoroughfares in cities from Copenhagen to Parma. On moonless nights, these barriers posed a formidable challenge to riders and pedestrians alike. Nuremberg alone maintained more than four hundred sets. Unwound each evening from large drums, they were strung at waist height, sometimes in two or three bands, from one side of a street to the other. In Moscow, instead of chains, logs were laid across lanes to discourage nightwalkers. Paris officials in 1405 set all of the city’s farriers to forging chains to cordon off not just streets but also the Seine. In Lyons, chains blocked the Saône, while in Amsterdam, iron barriers spanned canals.10

  Not until the close of the Middle Ages did urban curfews grow less repressive, with 9:00 or 10:00 P.M., rather than eight o’clock, becoming the standard hour for withdrawing indoors. More significant, public rather than private conduct increasingly prompted officials’ concern—wayfarers loitering abroad, not citizens burning late hours at home. An “Acte for Nyghtwalkers,” adopted for the town of Leicester in 1553, condemned “dyvers ryottous and evyll disposed persons” who spent nights “walkying in the strettes” causing “moche truble to the well dyssposyd people that wold take ther naturall rest.” This more liberal policy owed much, not to any diminished sense of nocturnal peril, but to the impracticality of earlier restrictions. In the face of law enforcement’s frailty, the unavoidable fact was that work and sociability occupied many families past the curfew hour. Often, for another hour or more, household windows stayed lit. To be sure, late-night merriment, whether at home or abroad, still provoked officials’ ire. In the words of a London regulation in 1595, “No man shall after the houre of nine at the night, keep any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the night.” Apart from revelry, common sources of disturbance, according to the ordinance, included brawling and beating one’s wife or servants—any instance of which could result in a fine of three shillings four pence.11

  In time, curfews also grew less restrictive for pedestrians. Step by step, more persons enjoyed greater freedom of movement, particularly if they bore honest reputations and sound reasons for travel, unlike nightwalkers, who, by definition, lacked “reasonable cause.” Besides those whose demeanor, looks, or location made authorities wary, several groups were enjoined from circulating at night because of the perceptible threat they posed to public order. These included foreigners, beggars, and prostitutes. In Paris, beginning in 1516, vagrants found themselves at night tethered together in pairs, whereas in Geneva, they were expelled at sunset. No stranger could remain inside Venice for more than a single evening without a magistrate’s approval. According to the medical student Thomas Platter in 1599, Barcelona confined prostitutes to a narrow street, closed each evening by chains. In many communities, they faced sporadic harassment from the nightwatch. The Common Council of London in 1638, for example, instructed constables “to do their best endeavour” to arrest “lewd and loose women wandring in the streetes” at night.12

  Of all marginal groups, Jews, where their numbers were greatest, endured the most systematic segregation, forced either to remain in urban ghettos, with their gates bolted at dusk, or to take refuge in the surrounding countryside. Among the “many detestable and abominable things” for which Jews were blamed at night was consorting with Christian women. Of Jews in Vienna, a seventeenth-century visitor discovered, “They must all depart at night beyond the river into the suburbs.” In Venice, where the late sixteenth-century population numbered a few thousand, ghetto gates, guarded by four Christian sentries, were shut from sunset to sunrise. Notably, an exception was made for doctors, of whom a large number resided in the Ghetto Nuovo after its completion in 1516. Because many of these possessed patients outside the ghetto, they were permitted to remain abroad on condition of supplying guards with written reports.13

  Not just prostitutes, but women in general were not to stray at night. Besides compromising their own virtue, they might sully, through low intrigues, the reputations of honorable men. By force of custom if not statute, women of all ranks and ages, save for midwives, risked public disgrace if they did not ke
ep to their homes. They might be mistaken for adulteresses or prostitutes, only to be accosted by strange men or arrested. In Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet Lanthorne and Candle-Light (1608), a constable demands of a woman, “Where have you bin so late? . . . Are you married? . . . What’s your husband? . . . Where lie you?” Years later, a band of law clerks in Grenoble justified their assault upon two maidservants by claiming that the girls “had no candles and prostitutes are the only women out of doors at night.”14

  Even males of good repute still faced constraints after dark. In Catalonia, for instance, no more than four men could walk together in a group. Unless licensed by permits, carrying weapons was frequently forbidden—arquebuses, pistols, or other firearms along with swords and knives, despite the prevalence of private arms within early modern households. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, English law prohibited pedestrians at night from wearing “sword or buckler, or other arms for doing mischief.” Italian towns forbade “secret weapons” such as daggers and pocket pistols, easily concealed under a cloak. If caught with a pistol in Rome, an offender might be sent to the galleys. Where nobles first claimed special privileges, laws repealed most of these by the late 1600s, in keeping with efforts by authorities throughout the nation states of Europe to wean subjects from their weaponry. In Paris, by virtue of an ordinance in 1702, not only were men of quality forbidden to carry firearms, but their servants were stripped of canes and staffs. The necessity to maintain order grew all the more urgent after nightfall, when opportunities multiplied for both personal and political violence. By day, armed travelers to Italian cities were instructed, “Liga la spada” (tie the hilt to the sheath), but at night swords were confiscated. “They who have license to cary swordes in the cittyes,” noted a visitor to Florence, “yet must not weare them when the evening beginns to be dark.” “The carrying of arms fosters violence,” a Spanish decree explained in 1525, and “many persons take advantage of the cover of darkness to commit all kinds of crimes and misdemeanors.”15

  Along with restrictions on weaponry, towns prohibited nocturnal disguises, including the use of visors and masks—employing a “false face,” in the words of an English law. Banned from time to time were hooded cloaks worn by women and oversized hats by men.16 Urban ordinances mandated that citizens, when abroad, bear a lantern, torch, or other “light” (not permitted were dark lanterns, possession of which in Rome could send one to prison). The main design was not to avert accidents. In Venice, in fact, members of the powerful governing body the Council of Ten were exempt from such restrictions. The purpose of these regulations, widespread throughout Europe, was, instead, to allow authorities to monitor citizens when the need for oversight was greatest. Seen from a short distance, the light from a lantern or flambeau might reveal an individual’s clothing and rank, if not their identity. Penalties for noncompliance were harsh. In Paris, not to carry a light risked a fine of ten sous, equivalent in the late fourteenth century to the price of sixty eighteen-ounce loaves of bread.17

  Otherwise, artificial lighting was scarce on city streets, not to mention in rural villages. Apart from the moon and stars, lanterns outside private homes afforded the principal illumination. Containing a lit candle, these were metal cylinders with narrow slits for protection from the wind or transparent sheets made from animal horn (the sawn horns of slaughtered cattle were first soaked in water, then heated, flattened, and thinly sliced)—hence the vernacular spelling “lanthorn.” At the beginning of the fifteenth century, London officials required households on main streets to hang one lantern apiece on designated evenings, always at private expense. Included were saints’ days as well as sessions of Parliament for the benefit of members forced to return late to their lodgings. In 1415, the first of many London regulations extended this mandate to all evenings falling between All Hallows’ Eve (October 31) and Candlemas (February 2). Paris, at the behest of Louis XI (1423–1483), adopted a measure in 1461 ordering lanterns to hang in the windows of dwellings fronting major streets, thereafter known as rues de la lanterne; and in 1595 Amsterdam established a similar decree, though meant to apply to only one house out of every twelve.18 Outside metropolitan centers, municipal improvements proceeded more slowly. In England, it would be another hundred years before provincial towns took halting steps in the wake of London’s lead. In the early 1500s, for example, lanterns were required to be hung in York by aldermen and in Chester by the mayor, sheriff, and innkeepers. Bristol and Oxford, on the other hand, made no provisions for street lighting before the seventeenth century.19

  Never were these maiden measures calculated to provide cities and towns with illumination each and every night. Most ordinances decreed that lanterns be displayed a few months a year, when winter nights grew longest, and only on evenings when the moon was “dark.” In London, lights were deemed unnecessary from the seventh night following each new moon until the second night after a full moon. More important, candles were not meant to burn overnight, but just to remain lit for several hours. Declared a watchman’s song:

  A light here, maids, hang out your light,

  And see your horns be clear and bright,

  That so your candle clear may shine,

  Continuing from six to nine;

  That honest men may walk along

  And see to pass safe without wrong.

  Intended to guide families homeward, candlelight failed to provide consistent security for either pedestrians or households. Owing to the expense of lanterns and tallow candles, coupled with persistent threats of vandalism and theft, the compliance of homeowners was erratic. Wind and rain made even more difficult the maintenance of lanterns, whose light, at best, cast a faint glow.20

  For the most part, streets remained dark. There were a few exceptions. In sudden emergencies, municipalities required families to furnish lighting, either by illuminating windows, setting bonfires, or placing candles outside doors. Residents of Danish towns, by law, had to repair outside, with candles and weapons in hand, to aid victims of violent crime. Fires mobilized households, as did military hostilities. In contrast to the use of urban blackouts in modern warfare, preindustrial cities required more, not less, lighting to mount defenses. One night in the early fifteenth century, the threat of a treasonous conspiracy in Paris caused an uproar “as if the city were full of Saracens,” with lanterns ordered lit by homeowners. Residents of Leeds, upon rumored fighting in a nearby town during the height of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, placed “thousands of lighted candles” in windows, as men prepared to march to their neighbors’ aid.21

  Public celebrations also occasioned displays of light at night. Government authorities organized massive illuminations, including fireworks, in observance of royal births, marriages, and coronations, as well as in honor of military victories during wartime. When the King of France in 1499 captured the citadel of Milan, joyous residents of Florence lit bonfires and illuminated the city’s towers to the accompaniment of pealing bells. In 1654, at the urging of officials, citizens of Barcelona lit their homes for three straight nights to celebrate the end of the plague. “Even though this was a time when there was little wealth and much hardship,” noted a contemporary, “everyone made an effort to do what they could.” On ceremonial occasions in England, typically the windows of urban homes glowed with candlelight, normally in unison with bonfires and fireworks. In 1666, on the night of the king’s birthday, Samuel Pepys barely reached home because of numerous fires in London’s streets. At patriotic celebrations, dazzling illuminations, set against the blackness of night, inspired widespread awe. “The people,” averred the “Sun King” Louis XIV (1638–1715), “enjoy spectacles, at which we, in any event, endeavor always to please.” A later observer shrewdly remarked that their purpose was to “keep the people in the dark.”22

  The Church, too, relied upon the power of pageantry. The centrality of light to Christian theology lent added force to sacred occasions, drawing attention to
the presence of Christ and the Church’s continual struggle against darkness—a conflict as real as it was symbolic. After all, light, as John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, was the “prime work of God.” To celebrate Christ, Pope Gelasius (d. 496) in the late fifth century established Candlemas, on which candles would thereafter be blessed every February 2. Illuminating the dark reaffirmed in dramatic fashion God’s dominion over the invisible world. Before the Reformation, all churches felt this imperative; but with the “stripping of the altars” in Protestant lands across Europe, the ornate use of candles and tapers invariably smacked of papist idolatry—“burning lampes, & lightes that alwaies flame / Before the Virgins image fayre,” ridiculed an English diatribe in 1553. Catholic sacraments continued to make extensive use of giant beeswax candles to illuminate church altars. White in color, the wax emitted little smoke and burned with a clear flame. Years later, James Boswell thought the candles, even unlit, gave “a clearer idea of heaven than any of the rites of the Church of England ever did.”23

  Jean Le Pautre, The 1674 Festival at Versailles Organized by Louis XIV to Celebrate the Re-conquest of the Franche-Comté, seventeenth century.

  It was at night that Catholics staged their most magnificent spectacles. More than any of the Protestant faiths, the Church of the Counter Reformation publicly proclaimed its nocturnal domain. Periodically, church bells assisted in this task, rung on both somber and festive occasions as well as during thunderstorms to frighten evil spirits. In the archdiocese of Salzburg, for example, church bells tolled all night during the summer solstice in 1623 because of fears of “devilish activities.”24 But light was the Catholic Church’s foremost weapon against darkness. Streets were strewn from one end to another with candles and paper lanterns to illuminate festivals. In seventeenth-century Germany, passion plays, organized every Good Friday by the Jesuits and the Capuchins, animated Catholic communities. In Spain on the Wednesday evening of Holy Week, processions, lit by candles with four wicks, passed in the streets as penitents were lashed before onlookers. Of a festival in the Sicilian town of Messina, a visitor noted in the early 1670s, “The streets are as lightsome almost by night as by day.” So remarkable was the display that the town could be seen for miles around. Cathedrals and churches formed the centerpiece of such spectacles, lit from top to bottom, as an onlooker described Rome’s Church of St. Mark one Christmas Eve. “A man would thincke it all on fire,” he exclaimed. “The illuminations are spectacular, like a scene from a fairyland,” pronounced Goethe—“one can hardly believe one’s eyes.”25